A very serious emergency has raised its ugly, merciless head, and it requires immediate assistance!Spore! What to do? Do I pre-order it from a store so I have the delicious pristine box and DVD, and risk not having it the day it is released? Or do I pre-order it from the EA website and sit through the painful second-by-second download observation torture, and go without my oh-so-desired physical box? Game.com claims that it can deliver it to me, so that it will arrive on the day of the release... but what if due to TRAGEDY SURPRISE MANIC EVIL my DVD arrives a day late? Or worse, two days late? Or due to several years worth of pre-orders, I dont get it for more than a week? But... the box!

And then, do I buy the full creature creator in June? All those delicious parts to play with, but i'll overplay it! It will remove some of the magic when the final thing is released. Maybe if I go with the free demo I wont ruin too much, and might not feel frustrated about having to earn pieces im already highly familiar with, and used to using on a whim. But what if by making any of my creatures prior to the game, I get used so used to seeing them, watching them do stuff in the main game isnt really that fun? Or I cant decide which creature to use, and end up trying to run several playthroughs at once (which i've done before, considerably slowing it all down).

DRAMA! INCONVENIENCE! REDUNDANCY!(Activate the ubercharge)

Did I say that Spore isnt overhyped and people are being quite sensible about it? You FOOLS! How could you fall for that? Of course Spore is overhyped. It is everything! It is the very lynchpin holding all of existance together! Without it world economy and our entire social structure would collapse! But seriously, I cant decide whether to hazard a pre-order on the boxed edition, for fear of having to sit out of spore for a week, given how long places have been taking pre-orders. I normally get the physical box and DVD simply because online downloads can be unreliable, plus I have a whole inch of spare room to fill with useless objects. So, out of plain curiosity, how've you gone about your pre-orders, or how to you intend to buy this damn thing? Im fairly unfamiliar with straight download purchases, aside from two .PDF files I grabbed, and I dont know how reliable online pre-orders are compared to straight pre-orders visiting a store.

go with the box. If the servers are backed up (which they probably will be) then it takes long to download plus you have to watch it download which is so much worse than not knowing when it's going to come. Not knowing means it might come before you expect it too which is a good thing. Plus downloading it means that if you change computers or want to install it on a second computer your screwed . Also, you don't get the box if you download it so you won't be able to read the manual as it's installing.